Cost analysis of Vista Content Protection by Peter Gutman

[Babrbarossa]

Peter Gutman writes a rather scathing review of the costs to the consumer of Content Protection in Vista. He goes into some depth on issues such as:

Disabling of Functionality
Decreased Playback Quality
Elimination of Open-source Hardware Support
Elimination of Unified Drivers
Problems with Drivers
Denial-of-Service via Driver/Device Revocation
Decreased System Reliability
Increased Hardware Costs
Increased Cost due to Requirement to License Unnecessary Third-party IP
Unnecessary CPU Resource Consumption
Unnecessary Device Resource Consumption

Read the article here

[sswilson]

Hmmmmmmmm.......

Linux (or apple) is looking better and better every day.

[Babrbarossa]

I think it's only a matter of three years before Google has developed their own free user-friendly version of Linux (although it will be filled with adware no doubt)

[SKYMTL]

I keep hearing rumblings of coders working on Windows XP versions of DX10. I wonder how true that is but I did see a post (not on any LEGAL area) where one person posted the complete DX10 source code with confirmed validity. People seem to be working on it very hard and from some of the posts I am seeing, it IS possible to recode certain aspects of the DX10 source code so it works with XP.

Some people are predicting it could take up to 9 months though...and that comes from a GROUP of about 50 coders that are working together.

[sswilson]

I wonder if enough public outcry over the DRM would get it squashed?

Strange how a software company looks like they're going to manage to incorporate hardware drm after so many years of the public saying "no way!!!" to the hardware manufacturers.

Remember when the P4's were going to ship with a specific cpu identifier and how quickly that got $h1t-canned?

What worries me about this is that consumers are not going to have a choice to vote with their feet.

The choice is simply not there.....

If we could purchase big-box computers without an OS it might send a message to microsoft that we're not interested, but as it stands any person purchasing a pre-built computer is going to be getting Vista whether they want it or not.

[Babrbarossa]

Well- there are large branches of the US federal Gov't that are banning Vista- and switching to linux!!- retraining the staff fot it. That's gotta send a loud message.

[enaberif]

Heh and now MS has made it so key updates for the OS can't be unchecked, so even if you wanted to not download a specific one you are SOL.

[Mars]

Originally Posted by enaberif

Heh and now MS has made it so key updates for the OS can't be unchecked, so even if you wanted to not download a specific one you are SOL.

Nobody forces anyone to run Windows Update to install anything. It's easy enough to run windows update to see which patches aren't applied, then to download the executable installers from the MS website.

[Supergrover]

Originally Posted by Mars

Nobody forces anyone to run Windows Update to install anything. It's easy enough to run windows update to see which patches aren't applied, then to download the executable installers from the MS website.

Yes I agree, but the majority of PC users have very limited experance and just use windows update.

[enaberif]

Originally Posted by Mars

Nobody forces anyone to run Windows Update to install anything. It's easy enough to run windows update to see which patches aren't applied, then to download the executable installers from the MS website.

And most of that is only allowed if you are using a valid key as it does a validation check.